Abstract

As populations age and pension expenditures grow, governments are increasingly engaged in encouraging workers to change their behaviour by extending their working lives. These policies must address multiple barriers to behaviour change that are very heterogeneous across individuals and sub-groups of the population. These barriers include declining health, reluctance to forego current pension receipt, signals sent by ‘standard’ pension ages that it is time to retire, caring responsibilities for parents and grandchildren, and peer effects as others in their age cohort retire. A variety of strategies are available to governments to alter this behaviour, ranging from improved information about longevity risks to increasing minimum and ’standard’ retirement ages.